Was reading The Investor Manifesto by Bernstein (published in 2009) and came across this
“Similarly, brokerage houses and mutual fund companies often tout the stocks of emerging-market nations, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the so-called BRIC countries) because of their rapid economic growth.
But beware: Share dilution, and often outright theft because of lax security laws, vaporizes a lot of this growth by the time it reaches the per-share level.
For example, China’s economy has been growing at a blistering 9 percent real rate per year for more than two decades. Yet between 1993 and 2008 investors actually lost 3.3 percent per year in Chinese stocks, even with dividends reinvested.
You read that right: Over this 16-year period, even before expenses, the investor in Chinese stocks lost 41.5 percent of value. (The loss of 3.3 percent per year before inflation calculates out to a loss of 5.7 percent per year after inflation.)”